As if sleepwalking across a millennium, they stared at the quantum memory mountain and forgot about time, and only when the true sun lit up the east as it had for billions of years did they return to reality.
“What’s going to come next?” the ambassador asked.
“As a program in the invisible world, it’s simple to make lots of copies of yourself, and whatever parts of your personality you dislike—being too tormented by emotions and responsibility, for example—you can get rid of, or off-load for use the next time you need them. And you can split yourself into multiple parts representing various aspects of your personality. And then you can join with someone else to form a new self out of two minds and memories. And then you can join with several or dozens or hundreds of people…. I’ll stop before I drive you mad. Anything can happen at any time in the invisible world.”
“And then?”
“Only conjecture. The clearest signs point to the disappearance of the individual; everyone in the invisible world will combine into a single program.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. This is a philosophical question, but after so many times thawing out I’m afraid of philosophy.”
“I’m the opposite. I’ve become a philosopher now. You’re right that it’s a philosophical question and needs to be studied from that standpoint. We really should have done that thinking long ago, but it’s not yet too late. Philosophy is a layer of gauze, but at least for me, it’s been punctured, and in an instant, or practically an instant, I know what lies on the road ahead.”
“We need to terminate our migration in this age,” the captain said. “If we continue onward, migrants will have an even harder time adapting to the target environment. We can rise up and fight for our own rights.”
“That’s impossible. And unnecessary.”
“Do we have any other choice?”
“Of course we do. And it’s a choice as clear and bright as the sun rising in front of us. Call out the engineer.”
The engineer had been thawed out together with the ambassador and was now inspecting and repairing the equipment. His frequent thaws had turned him from a young man to an old one. When the confused captain called him out, the ambassador asked, “How long can the freezer last?”
“The insulation is in excellent condition, and the fusion reactor is operating normally. In the Lobby Age, we replaced the entire refrigeration equipment with their technology and topped up the fusion fuel. Without any equipment replacement or other maintenance, all two hundred freezer rooms will last twelve thousand years.”
“Excellent. Then set a final destination on the atomic clock and put everyone into supersleep. No one is to wake up until that destination is reached.”
“And that destination is…”
“Eleven thousand years.”
Again, Hua entered the ambassador’s fragmented consciousness, more real than ever: his dark hair floated about in the chill wind, his eyes wet with tears, and he called out to her. Before she entered the void of unconsciousness, she said to him, “Hua, we’re coming home! We’re coming home!”
THE TREK
Outside of perception, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and time slipped past in the outside world.
… 1,000 years… 2,000 years… 3,500 years… 5,500 years… 7,000 years… 9,000 years… 10,000 years… 11,000 years.
STOP 4: BACK HOME
This time, even in supersleep time felt endless. Over the long ten-thousand-year night, the hundred-century wait, even the computer steadfastly controlling the world’s two hundred superfreezers went to sleep.
During the final millennium, parts began to fail, and one by one its myriad sensor-eyes closed, its integrated circuit nerves paralyzed, its fusion reactor energy petered out, leaving the freezers holding at zero through the final decades only by virtue of their insulation. Then the temperature began to rise, quickly reaching dangerous levels, and the liquid helium began to evaporate. Pressure rose dramatically inside the supersleep chambers, and it seemed as if the eleven-thousand-year trek would terminate unconsciously in an explosion.
But then, the computer’s last remaining set of open eyes noticed the time on the atomic clock, and the tick of the final second called its ancient memory to send out a weak signal to boot up the wake-up system. A nuclear magnetic resonance pulse melted the cellular liquid within the bodies of the advance-team captain and a hundred squad members from near absolute zero in a fraction of a second, and then elevated it to normal body temperature. A day later they emerged from the freezer. A week later, the ambassador and the entire migration commission were awakened.
When the huge freezer door was open just a crack, a breath of wind came in from the outside. The ambassador inhaled the outside air; unlike that of the previous three ages, it carried the scent of flowers. It was the smell of springtime, of home. She was practically certain that the decision she made ten thousand years ago was the correct one.
The ambassador and the commissioners crossed into the age of their final destination.
The ground beneath their feet was covered in green grass as far as the eye could see. Just outside the freezer door was a brook of clear water in which beautiful, colored stones were visible on the riverbed and fish swam leisurely. A few young advance-team members washed their faces in the brook, where mud covered their bare feet and a light breeze carried off their laughter. A blue sky held snow-white clouds and just one sun. An eagle circled languidly and smaller birds called. In the distance, the mountain range that had vanished ten thousand years ago during the Lobby Age was back again against the sky, topped with a thick forest….
To the ambassador, the world before them seemed rather bland after the previous three ages, but she wept hot tears for its blandness. Adrift for eleven thousand years, she—and all of them—needed this, a world soft and warm as goose down into which they could lay their fractured, exhausted minds.
The plain held no signs of human life.
The advance-team captain came over to face the focused attention of the ambassador and the commissioners, the stare of the day of judgment for humanity.
“It’s all over,” he said.
Everyone knew the significance of his words. They stood silent between the sacred blue sky and green grass as they accepted this reality.
“Do you know why?” the ambassador asked.
The captain shook his head.
“Because of the environment?”
“No, not the environment. It wasn’t war, either. Nor any other reason we can think of.”
“Are there any remains?”
“No. They left nothing behind.”
The commissioners gathered round and launched into an urgent interrogation:
“Any signs of an off-world migration?”
“No. All nearby planets have returned to an undeveloped state, and there are no signs of interstellar migration.”
“There’s really nothing left behind? No ruins or records of any kind?”
“That’s right. There’s nothing. The mountains were restored using stone and dirt extracted from the ocean. Vegetation and the ecology have returned nicely, but there’s no sign of any work by human hands. Ancient sites are present up to one century before the Common Era, but there’s nothing more recent. The ecosystem has been running on its own for around five thousand years, and the natural environment now resembles the Neolithic period, although with far fewer species.”
“How could there be nothing left?”
“There’s nothing they wanted to say.”
At this, they all fell silent.
Then the captain said to the ambassador, “You anticipated this, didn’t you? You must have thought of the reason.”